Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more An epidemiologist walks into a casino – what happens next? Feedback is tempted to say he wins the black spot, or some other top-quality pun, but our editor is giving us a long, hard stare, so we had better get on with it. Epidemiologist and mathematician Adam Kucharski was recently bemused to learn that the internet is making up stories about him.
Two posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, told the same tale: that he had walked into a casino for the first time in his life and won “500K”. The currency wasn’t specified in one instance, while in another, it was US dollars. One of the X posts even seems to quote Kucharski directly: “One evening I made 500K at a casino.
I had never gambled before – but I’d spent my whole life studying probability theory, and I decided to test one formula in practice.” This quote apparently came from Kucharski’s debut popular science book The Perfect Bet (2016). So far, so people making stuff up on social media. But mark the sequel: these stories at one point made their way into the AI Overview hosted at the top of Google Search when Kucharski looked up “kucharski 500k” – “with some extra AI invented detail”, as he points out.
The overview added that Kucharski has made a “lifelong study of roulette dynamics” and that he won by “applying probability theory and physics-based insights to roulette wheels, similar to the principles studied by Claude Shannon”. Feedback genuinely has no idea what that last bit is about. Shannon was a researcher who laid the theoretical groundwork for digital circuits and modern cryptography.
He wasn’t known for spread-betting on roulette. Yet again, AI systems are readily poisoned with nonsense from somewhere else – and that’s assuming the original X posts were written by humans in the first place, which nobody should assume at this point. It’s a particularly insidious example because Kucharski did write a book about gambling strategies, so the story is plausible enough to pass an initial sniff test: one needs actual knowledge of Kucharski’s life and work to know that it’s not true.
We will give the last word to Kucharski’s wife, entrepreneur Emily Kucharski. Responding to the claim that he had won half a million of some currency or another in one night, Emily said, simply, “If only this were true”. How big does an ocean wave need to be to tower over a roadside model of a carrot?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
